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46

Modern Parliamentary Eloquence

The same characteristics are visible when he speaks from a platform. Where another speaker would stretch himself out over an hour and a quarter, Mr. Asquith has said all that is to be said in fifty minutes. It is a miracle of succinctness, the apotheosis of business-like efficiency. There is no gesticulation, no self-abandonment, no flash or glow, but the case is stated, illustrated, argued, and proven with a force that is almost stunning. Further, the Prime Minister is the master of one incomparable art—the result, I imagine, of early practice at the Bar. He can represent the weakest of cases as though it were of overwhelming strength, the most startling of innovations as though it were an everyday procedure, the most disputable of propositions as though it were an axiom of universal acceptance. This combination of gifts, intellectual, personal, rhetorical, renders Mr. Asquith a Parliamentary workman of the highest order.

His memorial tributes.Never are these talents of concise and flawless expression better shown than on the occasion of his tributes to the illustrious dead. Of these I think that I should have selected for mention his eulogium upon King Edward, were it not that it has since been surpassed by his tribute to Alfred Lyttelton, an echo of the Virgilian cry that has rung down the ages: "Sunt lacrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt." He spoke as follows:

"Perhaps of all men of this generation Alfred Lyttelton came nearest to the mould and ideal of manhood which every English father would like to see his son aspire to and, if possible, attain. The bounty of nature, enriched and developed not only by early training, but by constant self-discipline through life, blended in him gifts and graces which taken alone are rare, and in such attractive union are rarer still. Body, mind, and character—the schoolroom, the cricket field, the Bar, the House of Commons—each made its separate contribution to the faculty and the experience of a many-sided and harmonious whole. But what he was he gave—gave with such ease and exuberance that I think it maybe said without exaggeration that wherever he moved he seemed to radiate vitality and charm. He was, as we here know, a strenuous fighter. He has left behind him no resentments and no enmity: nothing but a gracious memory for a manly and winning personality—the memory of one who served with an unstinted measure of devotion his generation and his country. He has been snatched away in what we thought was the full tide of buoyant life still full of promise and of hope. What more can we say? We can only bow once again before the decrees of the Supreme
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